


The O'Neill Method (gen version)

by Paian, Princess of Geeks (Princess), Sid



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Character Study, Character of Color, Friendship, Gen, Season/Series 08-09 Hiatus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-13
Updated: 2011-04-13
Packaged: 2017-10-18 00:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/182972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princess/pseuds/Princess%20of%20Geeks, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sid/pseuds/Sid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Between S8 and S9, Teal'c and Jack consider the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The O'Neill Method (gen version)

**Author's Note:**

> Co-written in the Arboreal Gate community when it was at Livejournal (has since moved to Dreamwidth).

Teal'c had an odd habit of showering in the small hours of the morning. Sometimes it was after he had woken sweaty and shaking from a disturbing dream, but not always. He had picked up the habit early in his residence at the SGC, when he still had a larval symbiote and never slept or dreamed at all.

Robert Rothman had once told him of a relative who had survived profound deprivation and abuse during one of the Tau'ri's many attempts at genocide among their own people; this elder Rothman would frequently rise in the middle of the night, go down to the kitchen, and stand at the open refrigerator eating a morsel of cheese or bread to calm his deep-seated terror of starvation -- to reassure himself that there was food, and he was permitted to eat it. After O'Neill and Captain Carter were rescued from Antarctica, Teal'c had noted the addition of a small space heater to O'Neill's office, symmetrically positioned in the opposite corner from the water cooler he'd requisitioned early on; after O'Neill's experience on the glacier, he needed the subliminal reminder that there would always be warmth if he required it, just as he had needed the soothing presence of available water ever since his experience lying broken in the desert many years before.

Teal'c had never been so dirty that it threatened his life. After the deprivation and near-death he _had_ suffered, it was almost amusing to contemplate a situation in which his worst fear was being unable to bathe. He had also seen the effects of unsanitary conditions on captive groups, and he knew that they were no joking matter; but he had no memory of ever suffering those effects himself. He was unable to divine the source of what he believed was a form of compulsive behavior. Moreover, he was unable to determine why it should occur to him to wonder about it only now that the System Lords' hold over the galaxy had been broken.

Perhaps it was that only now did he feel free to finally spend time thinking about things that could not affect the fate of the Jaffa. He had learned much from the Tau'ri regarding relaxation and 'having fun'. O'Neill had told him, "Sometimes you just gotta turn your brain off. Hey, you'll live longer!"

So Teal'c had watched the Star Wars movies until he knew the dialogue by rote, and watched Jerry Springer and Judge Judy and marvelled at the diversity of bad taste and Tau'ri stupidity available on the American television networks. He read the tabloid newspapers and the celebrity gossip columns.

But when he thought, he thought always of serious, weighty matters. Strange showering habits were not a thing to be dwelled upon while his people were enslaved, while there was a rebellion to be planned and organized. When he took time for himself, he had gladly followed O'Neill's advice, and returned to his obligations refreshed in mind and body.

Now, as he stood under the flow of water, he found himself contemplating his own future instead of the Jaffa's -- or, for perhaps the first time, separately from the Jaffa's. Both of his goals had been achieved: his people were free from their Goa'uld masters, and the Tau'ri were no longer at risk of enslavement or annihilation by the System Lords. That should leave him free, as well, he thought. But it did not.

The shower was failing to invigorate him. Rather than clearing and focusing his thoughts, it was fragmenting them. What ordinarily felt like a single flow of water was peppering his flesh like a spray of shrapnel. The plumbing and fixtures were the same; it was his perception that had changed. Water flowing in a strong, unified current through the pipe came out spread, separated, diffused. Droplets deflected by his body clung to the tile. Pearls of water slid down his thighs and flanks, discrete, ephemeral.

He did not want to leave his team. He did not want to dedicate the remainder of his life to politics. But soon his team would no longer exist -- Samantha Carter gone to the Groom Lake Facility, Daniel Jackson gone to Atlantis -- and he no longer had a purpose here. His place was with the Jaffa, no matter where his heart might lie.

He did not turn at the sound of boots on tile flooring. The sound surprised him, but he recognized that ambling gait, the familiar footsteps of a man fully capable of moving silently who was choosing to make his presence known.

"Gonna turn into a prune, you stay in there much longer, T."

Teal'c considered responding with his old fashioned method of misdirection by informing O'Neill with deadpan sincerity that there was no possibility of his turning into a prune because prunes were dried fruits and he was a mammal. But he decided against it. Although that form of what Daniel Jackson would call deliberate cluelessness had its roots in Teal'c's first forays into modern Tau'ri English, he, and his teammates, had outgrown it long ago. He smiled to himself, allowing the memories of early pain, early fear, conquered and transformed through his years with SG-1, and decided not to rise to any of the bait O'Neill had offered him. He quietly enjoyed the fishing pun, slowly reached to turn off the water, and turned to face his commander.

"I was merely taking your advice, O'Neill."

"I advised you to become a prune?"

"You advised me on the therapeutic mental qualities of a long, hot shower."

O'Neill had folded his arms. The shower area was quite warm, clouds of steam easing gently away from the two men and toward the ceiling. Teal'c stood easily, unselfconsciously despite his unclothed state. O'Neill was wearing BDU pants and a back t-shirt. He looked tired and rumpled.

"I did?" O'Neill said, and Teal'c could hear now that the weariness was in O'Neill's voice as well.

Teal'c reached for his towel and began to dry himself. "You advised me to rest my mind from time to time." With a small smile, unable to resist, he said, "You said it would extend my lifespan." Pretending to ignorance might be a thing of the past, but literal paraphrasing of their metaphor-rich language usually made his friends smile, and that was a pleasure he would indulge for as long as they had left.

"Turn your brain off sometimes and you'll live longer, huh?" O'Neill said. The hoped-for smile eased his rugged face for a moment, but fatigue seemed to pull at it, suggesting both meanings of their English word _gravity_. "Well, showers're a good place for that ... when it's quiet anyway."

As O'Neill turned to let him pass through into the locker area, Teal'c realized that this exchange with O'Neill had produced his answer. For all these years, solitary showers had been a form of meditation for him -- meditation that did not center on or stem from kel'no'reem, meditation that had never involved a symbiote. Meditation, in fact, that had nothing of Jaffaness in it. Jaffa used community baths, and aboard ship or in private dwellings cleansed themselves with basin and cloth. Showers were a Tau'ri invention. His need to indulge in them was a need to relieve himself, for those few precious minutes, of being Jaffa at all. The uniquely human activity of showering relaxed him in a uniquely human way. Every time he had sought out that soothing cascade of water in the deeps of night, he had been seeking to ease the burden of his heritage, his responsibility ... his destiny.

O'Neill found respite from the burdens of his service in his video entertainments -- in color-saturated fantasies where terrifying wizards were merely fronts for flawed, ordinary men and home was never more than a wish away; in animated drawings that used the guise of children's humor to make Tau'ri foibles and corruption laughable and render them, if only in effigy and for that brief half-hour, powerless. O'Neill showered in light and sound the way Teal'c showered in water. The method was the same; only the medium was different.

"You can stay, y'know," O'Neill said, propping a foot on the end of a bench and leaning a forearm on his knee, the other arm braced at the elbow on his thigh and draped across.

Standing at his open locker, Teal'c inclined his head, then began to dress. He did know; O'Neill had offered him a team of his own, a chance to serve the galaxy as an explorer instead of the oppressor and then liberator he had been until now -- an opportunity to continue on as an explorer instead of becoming, perforce, a politician. O'Neill knew how much he would like to escape his fate. O'Neill would spare him a future of policymaking, negotiations, civics.

He would spare O'Neill the same, if he could. But he could not. In order to protect this Program and to safeguard this planet, O'Neill would relocate to a place he did not like and accept a job he did not want among men he did not trust. Teal'c would do no less for his people.

Clothed in the uniform that had become as familiar as his skin these past eight years, Teal'c looked long at his old friend. "As can you," he said at last. "But neither of us wishes to turn into a prune."

O'Neill straightened and reached over to give Teal'c's shoulder an easygoing slap. "C'mon," he said. "Carter and Daniel should be hitting the commissary up for some coffee round about now. I'll buy you a Jell-O and you can tell me all about the plumbing on Dakara."

"Plumbing?" Teal'c said, genuinely curious, as he closed the locker with his name on it and followed O'Neill to the door.

"Plumbing," O'Neill said, moving into the corridor. "My dad was a general contractor and I'm a mean hand laying pipe, but if I'm gonna put in a shower for you, I'm gonna need some kind of water-supply system to work with."


End file.
